The story is centered in a middle eastern city called Khorasan, many years ago. It follows a teen girl named Shahrzad who is on a revenge seeking mission to kill the young king of Khorasan. The king has been marrying a different woman every night, and then having them murdered the next day for many months now, and he had Shahrzad’s best friend killed. Shahrzad is the first woman to volunteer to be the next bride sacrifice, and the king cannot help but wonder why this girl would give up her life. As the two start to spend more time together, Shahrzad begins to realize that there must be a reason why the king kills these women, and she is determined to find out why. I was so impressed with how strong the female characters were in the story, and how the author seemed to make a point that women are capable of saving themselves. The story has romance, suspense, action, humour, and it is a bit like Game of Thrones mixed with Aladdin but for Young Adults. A good book to read in the summer. (Submitted by Joy)

Jónína Kirton is our local poet. She is a Métis with Icelandic and Indigenous roots. It was especially interesting to read this collection of poetry because it’s modern, indigenous, and feminist. Jónína’s poems are relatable, in simple language, yet with complex meaning or, often, on complex subjects. There are poems that are filled with pain and sorrow, but when you read them – it feels like by saying and acknowledging all the heavy matters – we become lighter and calmer: accepting and forgiving. This is the true beauty of poetry: releasing our thoughts and feelings and transforming subjects into something else entirely. (Submitted by Mariya)

If you would like to meet Jónína Kirton in person and hear her story, then, feel free to register for an upcoming Authors Among Us event – Wednesday, September 26, 2018, 6:30-8:30 pm at the Guildford Library. For more information, please, visit this link.

Not only did I really like this one, my 4 year-old and his Dad loved it, too! The rhymes, the silliness, the illustrations – it’s all super. And really, I’d give it 5 stars just for the fact that it made my son randomly yell out, “IS ANYONE MISSING PANTS????” periodically. Fun fact: Jennifer Hamburg also writes for the popular children’s TV show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. (Submitted by Gayle)

This far-future science fiction trilogy (so far) holds enticements for a range of tastes. Within the covers of each volume you will find imperial palace intrigue featuring some truly nasty villains, action-packed fights and wide-screen space battles, and complex characters negotiating interwoven relationships and learning more about themselves than they might want to know. Whew!

Interstellar gunrunner Hail Bristol is dragged unwillingly and unceremoniously back to the home from which she fled many years earlier. Her family wants her—needs her—back, and Hail has little or no choice in the matter. Turns out she is no ordinary gunrunner. Her family is the ruling dynasty of the Indranan Empire. Hail wants nothing to do with them, for complicated reasons that become clear only later in the story. But Indrana is in crisis, and Hail is their last, best hope for survival. She’ll need all the toughness and cleverness that she has honed in her years of surviving and thriving plying her trade in the most violent corners of the galaxy. She will also need friends—but who can she trust? (Submitted by Jim W).

There are many facets to stories of childhood trauma, and many layers. As we see in Nadine Burke Harris book, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, trauma is no stranger to anyone: if we haven’t experienced ourselves, we know a loved one who has had experience with or witnessed it. When I read this book, I could not help but think of the children who are now separated from their parents at the borders and of children fleeing Syria. There are many places where trauma is a fact of life, and the inner city can be one of them. WHO recognizes that social conditions are important factors in health, and the all contribute to our total health. Nadine Burke Harris’ in The Deepest Well, gives a gripping account of her exploration of the link between adverse childhood experience or (ACE) and toxic stress. She is a social innovator in public health and serves a vibrant community, in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point (BHP). She describes the challenges she faced personally and professionally when she opened the Center for Youth Wellness (CYW) as well as her attempts to have ACE and toxic stress, recognized as serious issue in children’s health, which included getting pediatricians to use screening protocols for ACE in pediatric assessments.

Burke Harris, a pediatrician with a Master’s in Public Health, writes with compassion and balance about connecting the stress of her patients with their emotional and physical well-being. When offering free pediatric care to children via her clinic, CYW, in BHP, an area that is on the extreme end of San Francisco’s social and economic inequality, Burke Harris saw clear relationships between the trauma that the community’s children experienced and their emotional and physical health. Toxic stress can, and often does, manifest itself in disease and poor health. Her examination discusses how poverty in the inner city can result in greater incidence of poor health with difficult living conditions, more exposure to violence, and untreated mental illness. While San Francisco’s median income was above $100,000 in 2016, City-Data shows that 31% of residents of Bayview Hunters Point live below the poverty line as of the last U.S. Census.

Poverty contributes to trauma, but Burke Harris reminds her audiences that trauma crosses all socio-economic boundaries. She tells us not only the stories of the children that she treated, and still treats, at the BHP Center, but also about her personal journey of trauma. Trauma does not stop in the wealthier neighborhoods. Helping overcome childhood trauma depends on your caregiver. There are engaged and nurturing caregivers in every community, just as there are neglectful caregivers in any community; however, if you live in inner city poverty, your chance of seeing violence randomly outside the home is likely. In one of Burke Harris’ case studies, a teenage boy, recovering well from childhood abuse, sees his best friend is killed on the street in front of him. Understandably, this incident is a setback for his health. The children Burke-Harris treated suffer from multiple adverse reactions, and have debilitating physical and psychological challenges ranging from asthma, obesity, failure to thrive, to stunted growth.

Although Burke-Harris’ accounts of traumatic experience can be shattering, such as the boy who stopped growing at age four when he trauma is exclusive to inner city poverty. Burke Harris reminds her audience repeatedly that toxic stress is an issue in any income bracket. Bringing this to a wider audience, Burke Harris shows us that society suffers when it ignores childhood trauma.

Thankfully, something can be done to help children (and adults) suffering from toxic stress. In fact, according to Burke Harris, part of the antidote to toxic stress is truly integrated health treatment including a combination of healthy relationships, counselling, meditation, exercise, and nutrition. The caregiver and their response to trauma play a huge role, but, sadly for those in underserved areas, so do the resources available to the child.

Though the subject matter is tough, the book and its author are inspiring, positive and passionate. This title comes as a hardcopy, eBook and is also available as an audiobook narrated by the author, which I highly recommend.

How would your life change if you knew the date on which you will die? This is the premise of Chloe Benjamin’s novel, The Immortalists. It follows the lives of the Gold Family from 1960’s New York City to San Francisco in the 1980’s, Vegas in the ‘90s, to the present day in Upstate New York, and everything in between. The trajectory of the lives of the Gold siblings is permanently altered when they meet a psychic who reveals to each of them the date they will die. Benjamin takes us along for the ride as they grow from curious and innocent children in the summer of 1969, to adults with full and complex lives. One by one, we discover how their lives unfold, and how knowing when the end will come both burdens and frees them in unimaginable ways. Benjamin tackles the question of fate with clarity and heart, and I highly recommend The Immortalists for fans of thought-provoking, sweeping family sagas. (Submitted by Sarah J.)

As a fan of both historical fiction and supernatural horror, when I heard there was a new novel out about the Donner Party, I knew I had to read it. Enter Alma Katsu’s new novel, The Hunger. Set in 1846, this novel is based on the true story of the Donner Party, a doomed group of 100 people heading to California’s fertile valley farmland by way of wagon train. As tragedy after tragedy laid waste to the group, only a handful ever made it.
The Donner wagon train contains two large wealthy families, a beautiful woman rumored to be a witch, a large Mormon family without a patriarch, and some single men, who are all leaving their family farms in Illinois hoping for a better life. As Katsu weaves her story around their lives and voices, the reader gets a good sense of just how hard it was for people on the trail to make it: they must give birth on the trail, tend to the sick, hunt their food, gather their medicine from plants, and deal with the physical act of walking nearly 12 hours per day. Though many of the group start off as strangers to one another, the reader comes to find their lives and sins are intimately connected, revealed through haunting glimpses into all of their shady pasts. As the group members begin to become aware of these connections, their camaraderie is quickly worn away. These divisions spell their doom as their environment grows more barren and a supernatural evil begins to prey on them. (No spoilers!)
This book is not for the faint of heart. It showcases the best, as well as the worst, parts of human nature when faced with a raw survival situation. Despite the difficult subject matter, I found this to be an extremely captivating read, and eager to read more about the Donner party (perhaps my next read will be a non-fiction account of this tragedy, The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party, by Daniel James Brown). Katsu changed a lot of the real story, but she used many real life events that happened to these real people and seamlessly added a supernatural evil. The result is totally thrilling and cinematic. I eagerly await a film adaptation! (Submitted by Mandi)